Everything is Really Everyone!

Everything is Really Everyone! brings Kanishka Kanishka and Vasudev Vashisht together to explore photography as an evolving ecology, where slime molds, soil, compost, and other nonhuman agencies actively decenter images, memory, and authorship.

Kanishka Kanishka & Vasudev Vashisht: Everything is Really Everyone!

Curated by Sara Hodaie

Where does the image begin? How, and by whom, are records made?

Everything is Really Everyone! gathers Kanishka Kanishka and Vasudev Vashisht, to consider the conditions and potentials of image-making. By engaging interspecies agencies and temporalities as active participants in the photographic process, the artists challenge photography’s legacy as a fixed object of representation produced by a sole (human) author. Reproduction, growth, weathering and sedimentation become photographic apparati, shaping images through the material uncertainties of the ecologies from which they emerge.

Questions about the stability of the photographic archive and matrilineal inheritance are “contaminated” by the metabolic activity of slime molds in Kanishka Kanishka’s living photos, which foreground the marginalization of non-human and women’s labors and the mutability of memory. Vasudev Vashisht approaches these ideas through the urban garden, a site of multispecies care and maintenance. He treats the garden as an outdoor darkroom in which organic matter, soil, and compost shape exposures.

For both the artists, photography becomes a means of entering into the relations which the image is meant to record. Moving beyond a logic of capture, the photo becomes an evolving ecology: an unstable ecosystem in which agency is distributed and memory is transformed and contested. Everything is Really Everyone! asks what becomes possible when the boundaries between subject, medium, and artist become increasingly difficult to maintain.